Peace movements: violence reduction as common sense

If one thing holds the overall movement of peace movements together it
is the goal of violence reduction. There’s a shared conviction that violence
is a choice, that there exists, much more often than commonly supposed, a more
violent and a less violent course of action

Can we justifiably speak of a
global movement against war? News reports from many countries suggest that
anti-militarist activism is widespread and varied. In Britain, Stop the War Coalition is currently
mobilizing against the threat of Western aggression against Iran. We see
reports of Israeli school-leavers refusing military service. In recent weeks
there’ve been stories and photos of robed Catholic priests and other brave
South Koreans cutting razor wire and paddling kayaks to stop the dynamiting of
bedrock in preparation for a new US naval base on the island of Jeju.

But how coherent, how cumulative,
how continuous is all this resistance? Is it irreversible, irresistible? That
was what I was asking myself, and others, as I trekked from country to country
in the last three years carrying out the research that was published this month
by Palgrave Macmillan in a book with the title Antimilitarism:
Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements. The actual questions
I asked of course were nowhere near as ambitious as these. I didn’t want to
hear, “Dream on!”. More soberly I set out to examine in careful detail, in a
number of locations, the objectives, methods, analyses and values of certain
organizations, movements and networks. To wonder: what do they add up to, what
divides them?

I went to Japan and made contact
with activist groups opposing the US-Japan Security Treaty and the many
military bases that weigh down the little islands of Okinawa. But the peace
movement in Japan is complex. There are groups defending the Peace Constitution, against
the push of right-wingers to turn Japan into a warrior state once more. There’s
rage against nuclear weapons - and who has more reason than the Japanese! And,
besides, much of the movement is markedly aligned in socialist and communist
wings. In South Korea too the movement is characterized by distinctive
tendencies. Some groups focus on reunification of North and South Korea, aiming
to turn 1953’s armistice into actual peace. That means turning a blind eye to
North Korea’s bomb, meanwhile. Others, in a different vein, campaign for
demilitarisation of both Koreas (and the region). Particular historic moments
bring together groups whose perspectives at other times divide them. In
midlands England at that moment when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead
against the people of Gaza – it was the winter of 2008/9 - many organisations
came together to oppose
the aggression. But they are variously Muslims, Christians and secularists who
at other times chant from different hymnals, if they’re not singing the lyrics
of Richard Dawkins or Antonio Gramsci.

Some chapters in the book on
antimilitarism report on studies I made of transnational networks. War
Resisters International, founded soon after the First World War, brings
together groups worldwide of conscripts refusing military call-up. An
interesting tension has always existed in this movement between a profound,
principled pacifism (their membership pledge goes ‘We… are determined not to support any kind of war and to strive for the
removal of all causes of war’) and the rousing aim of ‘the supercession of
Capitalism and Imperialism by the establishment of a new social and
international order based on the principle of co-operation for the common
good’. Er? Yes: revolution. But nonviolent revolution. WRI insist on the
irreducible necessity of fundamental change – nothing else will bring peace.
And they elaborate the means – see their Handbook for Nonviolent
ActionBut this tight and narrow path is strewn with drop-outs, the
ones who in desperation picked up a weapon, the ones whose refusal to shed
blood ended in settling for piecemeal reform within the system.

Violence, not merely as problem, sometimes as activist method, is a
tendentious issue for antimilitarist movements, as it is for the anticapitalist
and altermondialiste left generally. In Antimilitarism I describe
a major demonstration against NATO in Strasbourg in 2008 in which ‘black block’
activists in an otherwise orderly crowd retaliated against police teargas and
shock grenades by torching buildings and hurling concrete, putting other
demonstrators’ safety at risk. The incident gave rise to heartfelt debates
within the movement. Our peaceful protest showed up on Europe’s TV news that
evening as pure mayhem. How had we allowed this to happen? On the other hand
shouldn’t we recognize that working class youth have a strong case against the
state and, after all, “boys will be boys”?
We are likely to see more of this home-grown violence around the NATO Summit in
Chicago in next month.

The great majority of peace activists, logically enough, exclude
violence from their repertoire of action. Those most likely to endorse it are
certain sections of the left, including anarchist groups. But violence by no
means defines these, as is sometimes carelessly assumed. Anarchism has strongly
pacifist expressions, as well as that which deems violence liberatory and
effective.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know whether a given organisation or network
should be termed “anti-war”, “anti-militarist” or “for peace”. Violence as
method can perhaps be seen as a watershed in this varied landscape. Whatever
the cogency of the argument for violence in the context of movements located on
anti-militarist or anti-war terrain (and it’s not great), it clearly fails
entirely in the field of “peace” movements. In general I’ve found that, if one
thing may be identified as holding the overall movement of movements together
it is a broad goal of violence reduction.

Few in the movement are utopian enough to believe in the possibility of
a totally violence-free world. And they would not be in the movement at all if
they were pessimists enough to believe violence is human nature and we’re stuck
with it. Rather, there’s a shared conviction that violence is a
choice, that there exists, much more often than commonly supposed, a more
violent and a less violent course of action. There’s more than one policy,
programme, stance, gesture, turn of phrase,
and we can prefer one over the other. The cabinet can choose to cancel
the contract for the aircraft carrier. The man can choose to put down the gun.
The woman can choose not to slap the child. Violence is discretionary.

But what’s that about the woman
and child? Can violence in household and school, street and community, be
discussed in the same breath as armed conflict? There’s a growing and vocal
sub-set of anti-war, anti-militarist and peace movements that’s feminist, and a
lot of women activists argue that the violence of peace and war can and must be
considered a continuum. Movement organizations are mainly led by men, but women
are often a substantial part of the membership. Some break away to form
women-only organizations, like Women in Black and the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom, in which they can develop a distinctive theory
and practice.

Women who are caught up in
militarisation and war can scarcely overlook the gendered realities. Not only
are war-makers and war-fighters predominantly male - even when women are
recruited it does little to change armies. The values that govern states and
militaries continue to be those deemed masculine. Women and men do different
things in armed conflict, are tortured by different means, die different deaths
– or survive into different futures. War is gendered through and through.

Not
only gendered but sexualised. One striking aspect of the continuum of violence
running through pre-war, war-time, post-war and supposed peace-time is the
prevalence of rape. Rape is an exercise of power, an expression of aggressive
sexuality overwhelmingly enacted by men on women – though it may also be used
to humiliate other men. But the cut and thrust of combat, as those who study it
can demonstrate, is also experienced by many men and boys as erotic. A banal
reminder is the attractiveness of realistic war video games such as Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which recently set a new sales record. How many boy
children last Christmas were sitting on their sofas, delightedly,
onanistically, obsessed, shooting Afghans with realistic assault rifles?

A well-organized feminist element
in peace movements world wide is therefore contributing a fresh analysis of the
sources of war and what we must do to end it. Women are saying, yes, capitalism
is a cause of war – the competitive thrust for control of oil, minerals,
markets. And yes, nationalism is a cause of war, the mobilization by elites of
culture, religion and identity for the control of territory and resources. But,
we are saying, hey, look as well at the patriarchal sex-gender order we live
in. It’s a power system like those others, indeed inseparable from them. And
it’s a cause of war too. The way this malign gender power relation shapes men
and masculinity, women and femininity, predisposes us to war. It makes
war for-ever thinkable, for-ever likely.

That being the case, feminist
work for gender change, the women’s anti-war movement argues, has to be
recognized as peace activism. A major step towards realizing the potential for
a coherent global movement against militarism and war, one with
counter-hegemonic reach, would be an uncoupling of men and masculinity from
violence – culturally, conceptually and actually – both in the world and in our
movements. This is not to suggest we should slacken our struggle against
capitalism, nationalism and other destructive -isms. It’s simply to pay due
attention to the fact that the “we” who have to cohere in an unstoppable peace
movement, while undeniably challenged by the power differentials of class and
ethnicity, are even more seriously, and intimately, riven by gender oppression.
It’s a power relation we actually have the tools to dismantle. And who’s better
placed than men to pick up the spanners and get to work?

Dr. Cynthia Cockburn is a feminist
researcher and writer, honorary professor in Sociology at City University
London, and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of
Warwick. She lives in London. Her new book is Looking to London, published this month by Pluto Press.

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